As Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) mulls over whether she will sign or veto a bill, SB-1070, recently passed by the Arizona legislature that would set up some of the most draconian immigration laws in the country, other states are already “watching to see whether they should follow in the state’s footsteps or stand back.” Michael Hethmon, general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — which helped draft the language of SB-1070 — has stated that he has been “approached by lawmakers from four other states who have asked for advice on how they can do the same thing.” Hethmon boasts that “what’s happening in Arizona just didn’t pop out of nowhere. It’s the latest step in a fairly deliberate process.” Hethmon’s troubling remarks beg the question of who is behind an organization that is strategically working on developing costly and ineffective policies that empower states and localities to take immigration law into their own hands.

IRLI is the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigrant group that has most recently been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Immigration Reform Law Institute calls itself, “America’s only public interest law organization working exclusively to protect the legal rights, privileges, and property of U.S. citizens and their communities from injuries and damages caused by unlawful immigration.” However, the Center for New Community (CNC), has another take on what IRLI stands for. According to CNC, IRLI’s “primary purpose is to push legal causes that unfairly target immigrant communities.”

In a nutshell, the IRLI has been behind most, if not every, local legislative immigration crackdown over the past few years. IRLI has taken part in a class action suit against California educators for allowing immigrant students to attend school. They have been behind a series of initiatives to prohibit members of local communities from renting to undocumented immigrants and sued Secretary Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), despite his aggressive workplace raids. In California, the Immigration Reform Law Institute has also aligned itself with a state ballot initiative aimed at overturning the 14th Amendment citizenship requirements and ending pre-natal and non-emergency care and child welfare checks that benefit the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach makes about $300 per hour to train Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers in immigration matters. Kobach is kept busy considering Arpaio is currently the subject of a racial profiling investigation by the Department of Justice and has 2,700 lawsuits sitting on his desk as a result of his immigration policing tactics. A recent documentary investigated the role IRLI played in an anti-immigrant ordinance proposed in Prince William County:

IRLI may identify itself as a “public interest law firm,” but its efforts come with a serious price tag. The National Employment Law Project has shown that “ill-conceived immigration ‘enforcement only’ approaches” carry “grave economic risks.”

In 2006, the State of Colorado passed a series of bills meant to deny public services to undocumented immigrants, create a new penalty for use of fraudulent documents, enroll all state departments in the federal Basic Pilot program, and require state police to enforce immigration laws. One year later, eighteen state departments had spent a total of $2.03 million on implementation of the new laws and identified zero undocumented immigrants.

In Riverside, New Jersey, a town of 8,000 spent $82,000 in legal fees defending its restrictive immigration ordinance which penalized anyone who employed or rented to an undocumented immigrant.

Currently, IRLI is helping Farmers Branch, a small town of 30,000 people in Texas, repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional. Since September 2006, the town has spent $3.2 million on the legal fight and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year.

Prince William County supervisors ultimately decided against moving forward with the police enforcement of the immigration law after they found that the price tag would be a minimum of $14 million for five years.

Though the Arizona law is poised to pass, IRLI stands to profit even more from the legislation once it becomes the law of the land. The ACLU has stated, in unequivocal terms, that SB-1070 is downright unconstitutional in that it exacerbates racial profiling and violates the constitution’s Supremacy Clause. If Arizona’s law really is the “leading edge” as Hethmon suggests, IRLI will continue to benefit from the exploitation of the nation’s broken immigration system and the insecurity and fears that come with it.

One of the main conservative attacks on the New START treaty is that it will constrain the development of our planned missile defense system. Despite repeated comments from officials – including Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher who stated bluntly, “definitely, positively, and no way, no how” does this limit our plans for missile defense – conservatives have continued to insist otherwise. John Bennett of Defense News reported:

Republican senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee used the bulk of their time to air their concerns that the Obama administration might stop or slow some missile defense programs “to appease Russia” and keep Moscow from withdrawing from the pact.

Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) even accused the administration of lying to him at a speech to the NDU Foundation. Kyl claims that a provision within the treaty prevents retired missile launchers from being converted to uses for missile defense. Therefore Kyl, and the conservative right says this is evidence that the treaty actually does contain “limits” on missile defense contrary to Administration assurances. In fact, Kyl apparently feels so personally slighted that he suggested he would be willing to try to block the treaty over it:

More important to me, the Obama administration negotiators were disingenuous at best in the way they described the wording on missile defense, and some would go further than disingenuous to describe what they did.

But these protestations are disingenuous at best. According to General Patrick O’Reilly, the head of the US Missile Defense Agency, these complaints are simply not true. In fact, New START, as the General says, “actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.”

The General also dismissed claims that a provision within the treaty that prevents the US from using deactivated missile launchers for missile defense was a constraint of any kind, as conservatives suggest.

Relative to the New START Treaty, the New START treaty actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program… our targets will no longer be subject to START constraints, which previously limited our use air-to-surface and water borne launches of targets, which are essential for the cost effective testing of missile defense interceptors against medium and intermediate range ballistic missile targets in the Pacific area.

…The New START treaty also has no constraints on ballistic missile defense system deployment. Article V section 3 of the treaty prohibits the conversions of ICBMs or SLBM conversion to missile defense launchers and vis-versa, while grandfathering 5 former ICBM silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base already converted for ground-based interceptors. MDA never had a plan to convert additional ICBM silos at Vandenberg. Moreover, we have determined that if more interceptors are added to Vandenberg Air Force Base it would be less expensive to build a new GBI missile field, which is not prohibited by the treaty. Regarding, sea launched ballistic missile launchers sometime ago we examined the concept of launching ballistic missile defense interceptors from submarines and found it an unattractive and extremely expensive option.

Watch it:

These comments coming from the General in charge of the Missile Defense Agency poor cold water on the claims from Republicans. O’Reilly is making two points. First, that the New START treaty removes some of the limitations that existed in the old START treaty – particularly in regards to past restrictions in how we could test the missile defense system. Therefore it removes missile defense constraints.

Second, he notes that the claimed “limitations” only prevent the US from doing something that it had absolutely no intention of ever doing. General O’Reilly is crystal clear that converting retired launchers is unnecessary because it is both more technologically challenging and prohibitively expensive. O’Reilly therefore notes that if it was deemed that we needed to expand the system we could just build more missile silos, since it would be more cost effective to build new ones than retrofit existing silos.

So when Kyl essentially calls the Obama START negotiators liars for insisting START does not limit missile defense, he is in effect also calling General O’Reilly a liar.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reports that, despite President Obama’s hard diplomatic work in bringing Russia and China closer to a UN sanctions resolution, “administration officials acknowledge that even what they call ‘crippling’ sanctions could prove ineffective in keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons”:

That stalemate, in the view of many analysts, means that a strategy of containing Iran is inevitable — diplomatic isolation backed by defense systems supplied to Persian Gulf allies.

“I think we are in for a long cold war with Iran. It will be containment and deterrence,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a former top State Department official who is now a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Iran will muddle along building its stockpile but never making a nuclear bomb because it knows that crossing that line would provoke an immediate military attack.”

Meanwhile, in terms of how we got here, Laura Rozen reports a fantastic pwning by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), who, at a hearing of the House Middle East subcommittee yesterday, strenuously pointed out the utter lack of credibility of the Bush administration hawks who not only failed to stop Iran’s nuclear program but whose approach to the Middle East actually provided the Islamic Republic with one of the biggest strategic boosts in its history.

“In terms of U.S. credibility” in the Middle East, Ackerman said, “the Obama Administration inherited, not a partial failure, but a total collapse“:

And from the policymakers and supporters of the previous Administration, who in decency ought to have slunk off in shamed silence for having watched fecklessly as this disaster — like Iran’s steady march toward nuclear weapons-capability — unfolded under their watch, what do they have to say today?

Well, mostly what they have to say involves tiresome repetition of “Munich,” “Chamberlain,” and “appeasement.” Ackerman had some words for this too:

“Appeasement! Appeasement!” they cry, attempting to evoke the days leading to World War II.

This charge is grotesque. Apart from the indecency of comparison with the unique horror and evil of Nazi Germany, the cheap demagoguery of the word utterly fails to capture what the Obama Administration is actually doing. Where, one might ask, is the long list of concessions from America to Syria? Where is the surrender and sell-out of allies? Where is the retreat in the face of challenge? A few airplane parts? A few inconclusive meetings?

The string of defeats and failures that brought us to the current impasse occurred, let us not forget, during the previous Administration. The seeming limits of American power were brutally exposed well before Barack Obama was even elected to his high office.

Appeasement? Shameless nonsense. And more empty words.

It is true that the Obama Administration is pursuing a different policy than the spectacular failure of its predecessor. But that’s just good sense. Everywhere but Washington, not repeating mistakes is considered a good, or even a very good thing.

Heckuva job, Bushie.